AuthorizeNet Announces Automated Recurring Billing

It’s about friggin’ time that Authorize.Net has come around and added what would seem to be a “no brainer”.

I’m talking about recurring billing, recurring revenue, subscriptions, etcetera.

When I first got a merchant account, Authorize.net didn’t have any option for recurring billing.

Then they came out with something they called “ARB” which was something that the vendor (me) had to set up manually. This doesn’t help internet entrepreneurs set up an automated business very easily.

Authorize.net is a solid company, in my experience, and my merchant account vendor sets me up with them at a pretty reasonable rate: no setup fee and $20 per month.

If I wanted to do a recurring subscription payment product then I would have to either sign up with a company like 1shoppingcart.com or use PayPal. PayPal tends to take a bigger cut of a $20 charge than my merchant account, and some folks get scared away from it.

1shoppingcart.com charges a monthly fee around $40 and offers an all-in-one service. Their recurring subscription service works fine with Authorize.net, but I think what they do is just save the credit card info in their database (hopefully very securely) and run the transactions through every month using automated scripts on their end.

On the positive side, the $40 per month gives you a lot of bells and whistles, and 1shoppingcart.com saves you the time and expense of getting your own security certificate.

But I was thrilled this last Friday to get an email from Authorize.net about the new service which promises to make recurring subscriptions available through their automated AIM service. This is an api which a coder, like me, can use to set up a payment form and securely send the payment info over to Authorize.net for processing.

I don’t have to store the credit card info (which I never would) and I don’t have to worry about third party vendors.

Pricing

Authorize.net seems to be planning to charge a $40 setup fee and $15 per month for this service that some of its competition provides standard. I’m not excited about the fee structure on this, but during the promotion they’re waiving the setup fee and locking you in at $10 per month.

Deal of the century… no. But if this option is for you, you’d be smart to lock in the lower price.

Code to Be Released Soon

I’ll crank out some code for the new Authorize.net recurring billing program and make it available on this site.